Content Warning: This story includes graphic mentions of suicide.
Even after being pushed into hiding and, as confirmed in an August 23 interview with Global News, forced to leave her home country of Canada, trans political commentator and streamer Clara “Keffals” Sorrenti is demanding website security service Cloudflare quit protecting Kiwi Farms, an alt-right forum she says is a fountain of doxxing and unmitigated hate. Sorrenti started the hashtag #DropKiwifarms, which Vice reports, trended alongside #CloudflareProtectsTerrorists this week.
Some Twitter users, the majority of whom seem to be trans, are rallying behind #DropKiwifarms, using it as an opportunity to share their personal experiences with the forum that allegedly uses doxxing, swatting, and other intimidation tactics to bully their arbitrary targets, sometimes leading their victims?to kill themselves.
When people kill themselves allegedly because of Kiwi Farms users’ unrelenting vitriol, those users fantasize about attending their funerals “wearing Guy Fawkes masks and pickle suits and all ‘PARTY HARD!!!’ with loud music, free food, and drink,” one post said. Posts like this belie a nauseatingly childish understanding of death, consequence, and one’s own insecurities, but instead of, I don’t know, seeking a therapist, Kiwi Farms posters prefer to let themselves get lost in the abomination they create.
“Cis friends: this is the awful, ugly reality of Kiwifarms,” one Twitter user using #DropKiwifarms wrote. “Do not let them lie to you—they systematically drove [Chloe Sagal] to suicide. They had a great time doing it, too.”
Despite years of public outcry—New Yorker called the site the internet’s “biggest stalker community” in 2016—and evidence of Kiwi Farms users’ illegal conduct plastered all over its forums, Cloudflare, which did not respond to Kotaku’s request for comment in time for publication, continues to provide its services to the site. In the past, Cloudflare decided to cease servicing neo-Nazi message board Daily Stomer after “the team behind Daily Stormer made the claim that we were secretly supporters of their ideology,” Cloudflare CEO and co-founder Matthew Prince wrote in a 2017 blog post.
“We’re going to have a long debate internally about whether we need to remove the bullet about not terminating a customer due to political pressure,” Prince wrote at the time.
“Political” pressure aside, Kiwi Farms violates Cloudflare’s Terms of Use, which prohibits “illegal or harmful content,” including “content that discloses sensitive personal information, incites, or exploits violence.”
On August 23, Kiwi Farms went offline and then back online, a promising blip for #DropKiwifarms users. After the site went back online, Sorrenti tweeted that she would “commence the next phase of the campaign to get @Cloudflare to drop Kiwifarms this week.” Sorrenti did not respond to Kotaku’s request for comment in time for publication.
Twitter users continue to campaign against Kiwi Farms, but some people have reported that Cloudflare employees, including Justin Paine, head of trust and safety, blocked them on Twitter for asking them to stop servicing Kiwi Farms. As for Sorrenti, she tweeted “My family has been targeted and threats have been made against them explicitly because of the campaign I started to get Cloudflare to drop Kiwifarms.”
“I do not negotiate with terrorists, and I will not let them intimidate me.”
?If you or someone you know is contemplating suicide, please call the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988.
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