“When you get your own thread on Kiwi Farms it means there are enough people interested in engaging in a long-term harassment campaign against you,” Sorrenti told CNN in an interview Monday, explaining how Kiwi Farms users were targeted. . “The first thing they did when they opened my thread was find my dead father’s obituary and use it to find his Facebook page,” she explained. “They were able to find a picture of my dad on the front porch of my childhood home and from that use Google Maps and figure out where he was.” When the trolling and harassment continued, and with more information about her location available to the trolls, she decided to leave Canada and stay with a friend and fellow trans activist in Belfast, Northern Ireland. But the trolls spotted her here too.
“Exhausted” from the run, Sorretti finally decided to start a campaign to get the Anemone Farms off the internet.
What Sorrenti did, and the questions she raised, may well be the next frontier in the debate about what big Internet companies should do about the online hate and harassment campaigns that are organized with the support of their services. While much of the focus in recent years has been on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, other Internet service companies are also facing scrutiny.
Removing a website from the internet is not a simple task. It’s certainly not as easy as, say, reporting a hateful account on Twitter or Facebook, a situation in which an individual company can decide what to allow on its platform. The internet as a whole is much more free and anarchic.
However, websites don’t become or stay online by themselves — they rely on companies that provide hosting, cyber security and other services. Now, say activists like Sorrenti, it’s time for those providers to also take responsibility for online hate and violent threats.
One such company, which has featured prominently in the Kiwi Farms debate, is Cloudflare, a large American company. Cloudflare offers a number of services, but in the case of Kiwi Farms it was neither a platform nor a host. Instead, Kiwi Farms used Cloudflare’s security services to protect it from cyber attacks. These types of services are vital to maintaining a website online. If Cloudflare blocks its services on a site, it can effectively take it offline, at least until the site finds another provider.
In 2019, Cloudflare backed 8chan, another hate forum, after it was linked to a shooting in El Paso, Texas that killed 23 people. Cloudflare also banned neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer from using its services in 2017.
But Matthew Prince, Cloudflare’s CEO, has long expressed unease about the potential role his company could play in deciding what can and can’t be online. Prince’s position is often echoed by others in Silicon Valley who argue that it shouldn’t be up to them to police speech online. Cloudflare initially indicated last week that it would not act against Farms Kiwi, explaining in a blog post what it saw as the unintended consequences of withdrawing support for 8chan and The Daily Stormer.
The post did not directly refer to Kiwi Farms, but Cloudflare said its decisions to stop supporting 8chan in 2019 and the neo-Nazi site The Daily Stormer in 2017 had unintended consequences. “In a deeply troubling response, after both shutdowns we saw a dramatic increase in authoritarian regimes trying to get us to end security services for human rights organizations,” the blog post read. But by Saturday, amid a wave of media attention on Kiwi Farms following an NBC report on the site, Cloudflare reversed its position, deciding to stop providing services to Kiwi Farms, citing “imminent threats for human life”. After Cloudflare withdrew its support, Kiwi Farms was temporarily unavailable, but was soon back online with the support of a Russian ISP, DDos-Guard. (DDos is a type of cyberattack that can make websites inaccessible.) But on Monday, DDos-Guard also blocked kiwi farms. DDos-Guard issued a statement explaining: “We want to emphasize that access to our services is available to any customer, even without the involvement of administrators. This is how Kiwi Farms activated its DDoS protection service . Then we came back after the weekend and I stepped into the limelight.” “We do not moderate content posted on customer sites, as we are not Facebook and do not aspire to be,” the company said, but added “there are certain things we consider unacceptable under any circumstances.” Alissa Starzak, Cloudflare’s global head of public policy, told CNN on Monday that there needs to be a more “holistic” approach to tackling online hate.
“We really need long-term solutions because removing security services,” he said, “doesn’t address the long-term threat of online harassment or escalating violence, or certainly not death threats.” “I think I understand where they’re coming from,” Sorrenti said of Cloudflare’s initial response. “They don’t want to see a future where companies can decide, ‘I like this site. It should be on the Internet. I don’t like this site. It shouldn’t be,’ but I don’t think it’s a free speech issue.” “When it gets to the point where a website is a threat to people’s lives, it should absolutely be pulled from the Internet,” he added.
The actions of Cloudflare and DDos-Guard have effectively taken Kiwi farms offline, at least for now. Sorretti knows all the trolls won’t go away just because the site is offline, but she hopes it will make it harder for them to mobilize.
“By showing them that we can organize against this kind of online harassment and succeed, that will have a chilling effect,” he said.