Nuked Cloudflare, a website security and hosting provider, announced on Saturday that it had blocked Kiwi farms, an online forum known for hateful content. In a post on CloudFlare’s blog, the company said Kiwi farms posed an’immediate threat to human life’.
Transgender YouTuber and Twitch streamer, Clara sorrenti, had been targeted by a dangerous harassment campaign. Kiwi farms users waged a swatting attack against sorrenti, otherwise known as the act of providing a false tip to police that someone’s planning on a violent crime, resulting in police swarming the victim’s home.
Sorrenti later went into hiding and started a # dropkiwifarms campaign. Users across Twitter shared the hashtag, also with some revealing the harassment they’ve experienced at the hand of Kiwi farms’ users.
Cloudflare initially resisted calls to drop Kiwi farms, saying that it would be’an abuse of power’. In an update posted to its site last week, CloudFlare outlined its policies on abusive content.
Cloudflare says the telephone company does n’t terminate your line if you say racist, bigoted things. The company has concluded that turning off security services because we think what you publish is despicable is the wrong policy.
Cloudflare did n’t provide hosting for Kiwi farms’ website, but provided security services that many saw as instrumental to keeping the site online.
Kiwifarms may move their sites to other providers and, in doing so, come back online, but we have taken steps to block their content from being accessed through our infrastructure. Cloudflare has coordinated with law enforcement to address some of the threats on the site, but claims the’process is moving more slowly than the escalating risk’.
Cloudflare says it did n’t block the site due to the social media campaign that urged the service to drop Kiwi farms as a customer. Instead, the post says the decision was based on an uptick in aggressive activity on the platform.
