“After analyzing the website’s content, we decided to terminate the DDoS protection services” for a version of the Kiwi Farms website with a Russian .ru domain name, the company said. The .ru site, registered in mid-July, ran intermittently after Cloudfare suspended services on Saturday.
The website, created and run by Joshua Conner Moon, 29, has been a rallying point for the vicious harassment and doxing of transgender people, feminists and people of color.
The takedown of Kiwi Farms – both providers protect websites from distributed denial of service and other attacks – was followed by a violent campaign of outrage led by Canadian transgender twitch streamer Clara Sorrenti.
Cloudfare CEO Matthew Prince said in a blog post on Saturday that he was concerned about the free speech implications of effectively de-hosting Kiwi Farms, a reversal after defending his decision earlier in the week not to the forum to cap. But he said the escalation of targeted threats on the site has created an “imminent threat to human life” of proportions his company has never seen.
The California company has helped protect far-right sites in the past, although it dropped neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer as a customer in 2017 after a protester was killed by a marauding motorist at a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. In 2019, it did the same with troll forum 8chan after its pages posted a racist screed from the man who killed 23 people at an El Paso Walmart.
Sorrenti, known online as “Keffals,” launched her campaign in August, but relentless doxxing and other harassment forced her to flee her home in Canada last month. However, online stalkers didn’t let up, stalking her as far away as Northern Ireland, increasing her harassment.
On Monday, Sorrenti tweeted that she would have a final update on the campaign against Kiwi Farms.
It was unclear if Kiwi Farms would find a new home or if its users would possibly congregate in a new forum.
Posting to Telegram on Monday, Moon said the site will be down for at least a week while he attends to a family emergency. He said the site’s prospects are slim, although Cloudflare has given him an opportunity to register his .net domain elsewhere.
However, Moon said IP addresses he controls are at risk of being revoked by Australia. They would allow it to host itself, but it would still need an internet connection and protection from DDoS attacks.
“I don’t see a situation where the kiwi farms can just go ahead,” Moon wrote. “It will either become a broken shell of itself, like 8chan, or jump between hosts and domain names like Daily Stormer.”
Moon provided an address on the dark web that can be reached via the Tor browser. However, a website was not available. A message said the connection was lost.
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