Clara Sorrenti, a Twitch streamer and transgender activist, is set to leave the country after weeks of harassment she accuses of Kiwi Farms, a website and online forum with a history of harassment and bullying. Software developer and transgender activist Liz Fong-Jones tells us about her experience of being a target of Seaweed Farms in the past. After this story ran, we asked Kiwi Farms for comment. They responded with this comment: “The press are scum.” Software developer and transgender activist Liz Fong-Jones remembers how unsafe she felt the first time she said she was harassed by users of the US online forum Kiwi Farms in 2017. “I was worried for my life, that someone was going to show up with a gun and shoot in my bedroom,” she told Day 6’s Saroja Coelho. Although she had never interacted with the forum at the time, Fong-Jones said she was targeted by some users because she had donated to Trans Lifeline, a nonprofit organization that serves transgender people in the United States and Canada. She said they tried to smear the character of Trans Lifeline and when she denied their accusations online, they posted her personal information on the forum, including her home address, the names of her biological parents and a photocopy of her gender and reassignment. her name. “I was minding my own business. I was trying to support a transgender crisis line and now I was being targeted by these people I had never met before who were posting increasingly unflinching and violent threats against me.” On its homepage, Kiwi Farms describes itself as a “community dedicated to talking about wacky people who are willingly making fun of themselves.” Founded by Joshua Moon in 2013, Kiwi Farms is the forum where the 2019 Christchurch mosque gunman revealed his intentions hours before carrying out the attack. Has been linked in media reports to at least three suicides between 2016 and 2021. Clara Sorrenti, 28, a transgender activist known as Keffals to her large following on the video streaming platform Twitch, also accuses Kiwi Farms users of harassment she faced last month, including posting the location of her hotel room on the forum and her Uber Eats account hacked. “I’m really, really worried about my safety” he told CBC London. “I basically had to hide to make sure no one knew where I was because I didn’t want anything bad to happen to me.” Sorrenti said she left Canada in hopes of escaping the harassment, which has gotten “very bad.” Since then she has been wronged — having personal information about her posted online — in Northern Ireland. In response to a request for comment on allegations of harassment by Sorrenti and other transgender people, as well as people with autism, Kiwi Farms responded: “The press is scum.” Kiwi Farms also provided a link to the Sorrenti-related events version of the website. Clara Sorrenti, known as Keffals on the online platform Twitch, says she fled Canada in hopes of escaping online harassment. (Michelle Both/CBC) Fong-Jones, who is based in Vancouver, said targeted harassment and abuse is the unfortunate reality “when a site like Kiwi Farms and their fellow travelers [go] full power after you.’ “I hope that [Sorrenti is] able to rest at some point,” he said. “But, unfortunately, that will take a while, until [Kiwi Farms] they either go offline or lose focus and focus on someone else.”
Feeling alone
Fong-Jones described Kiwi Farms’ harassment campaigns as “psychological torture”. He said forum users typically target people who are economically insecure, who are role models for marginalized groups such as transgender people or those who are autistic or otherwise neurodeviant. “They will often try to spread false rumors or character assassinate you and try to get you fired from your job,” he said. “[They’ll] try not being able to pay your rent anymore, losing your housing and losing your ability to feed yourself. And they also tend to go after loved ones, family, partners.” “You can see how isolating that can be for someone who has now been repeatedly pushed and pushed to the brink.”—Liz Fong-Jones. He said that “their intention is to disconnect [victims] from any sources of support in their lives.” “[They] try to put as much pressure on you as they can so that when they tell you later that the only way out is to kill yourself, that’s what you will do,” he said. Part of this is done by threatening anyone the victim may come into contact with, according to Fong-Jones. These threats cause “people [to] either to distance themselves from you in the first place or to deliberately disconnect from them to avoid putting them in danger,” he said. “So you have no friends, you have no one to talk to, you have no one to confide in because you’re afraid they’ll be targeted for their relationship with you.” According to Fong-Jones, they will also target a person’s social media accounts by sending spam reports to platforms such as Facebook or Twitter to prevent the person from posting and contacting anyone online for support. “You can see how isolating that can be for someone who has now been repeatedly pushed and pushed to the brink,” he said. WATCHES | Canadian doctors speak out about online trolls and racism:
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Why 2 BIPOC doctors share their experience with hate and racism on social media during the pandemic While their target is suffering, Kiwi Farms users are celebrating, according to Fong-Jones. “Basically they see it as success if they can get someone fired from their job, success if they can get someone to kill themselves,” he said. “This is part of their ongoing campaign … to try to make transgender people no longer exist.” The lack of help from some law enforcement departments doesn’t help victims dealing with these users, according to Fong-Jones. In her case, she said, the responses she received from the New York Police Department in 2017 “was basically that you should log off, that if you just ignore it they’ll go away.” Day 6 reached out to the NYPD for comment but did not receive a response. LISTEN | London’s deputy chief constable refers to Clara Sorrenti’s arrest: London Morning8:36 Deputy Chief Constable of London Police spoke about the arrest of transgender activist Clara Sorrenti Deputy Chief Constable Trish McIntyre joins London Morning to address concerns about arrest swatting and a system that failed Clara Sorrenti and the police.
Social media law
One company that has faced calls to disassociate itself from Kiwi Farms is Cloudflare, a content delivery network and caching provider that provides caching and denial-of-service prevention services to Kiwi Farms. Although Cloudflare initially appeared to suggest it would not drop Kiwi Farms as a customer last week, the company blocked the site a few days later. In an email to Day 6, Cloudflare’s director of public relations, Leigh Ann Acosta, said the company has proactively contacted law enforcement to flag “what it believes are potential criminal acts and imminent threats to human life” on last two weeks. “While law enforcement in these areas is working to investigate, unfortunately the process is moving slower than the escalating risk – and the threat level on the site has escalated over the past 48 hours to the point we believe it is an emergency,” he said. he said. He added that Cloudflare’s decision to ban Kiwi Farms “is not an effective or long-term solution.” “We believe we need better legal mechanisms across society to ensure the protection of those threatened with violence online.” Emily Laidlaw, Canada Research Chair in cybersecurity law at the University of Calgary, said it’s not easy to focus on what Cloudflare’s role should be because of the lack of tools in its toolbox. “You want social media companies that can use milder types of mechanisms to deal with these things, whether it’s flagging content or … prompting users to rethink sharing something before they read it,” he said. Emily Laidlaw, the Canada Research Chair in cyber security at the University of Calgary, says she’s not at all uncomfortable focusing on Cloudflare’s role in combating kiwi farm-inspired harassment because of a lack of tools in their toolbox. (Francis Ferland/CBC) It’s also difficult to hold American Internet service providers like Kiwi Farms and Cloudflare responsible because of Section 230 of the US Communications Decency Act, Laidlaw said. Section 230 protects US Internet service providers from liability that may arise from their users’ online statements. “It was supposed to protect companies, whether they take content down or leave it up,” Laidlaw said. “The problem with Section 230 is that it didn’t really incentivize liability. So companies could take advantage of the liability shield but not take steps to actively control content and protect users.” That’s why, especially for online harassment, Laidlaw believes the first step to holding users accountable is to implement online harm legislation — something Canada doesn’t have, but is working on . “It would target, specifically, what would be the responsibilities of these different online services to manage the risks of harm,” he said. “It’s not directed at those who are actually involved in the criminal behavior, but what are the responsibilities of the social media service, maybe other…
